Posted on 05/03/2008 4:38:34 PM PDT by NYer
Scripture, our Evangelical friends tell us, is the inerrant Word of God. Quite right, the Catholic replies; but how do you know this to be true?
It's not an easy question for Protestants, because, having jettisoned Tradition and the Church, they have no objective authority for the claims they make for Scripture. There is no list of canonical books anywhere in the Bible, nor does any book (with the exception of St. John's Apocalypse) claim to be inspired. So, how does a "Bible Christian" know the Bible is the Word of God?
If he wants to avoid a train of thought that will lead him into the Catholic Church, he has just one way of responding: With circular arguments pointing to himself (or Luther or the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries or some other party not mentioned in the Bible) as an infallible authority telling him that it is so. Such arguments would have perplexed a first or second century Christian, most of whom never saw a Bible.
Christ founded a teaching Church. So far as we know, he himself never wrote a word (except on sand). Nor did he commission the Apostles to write anything. In due course, some Apostles (and non-Apostles) composed the twenty-seven books which comprise the New Testament. Most of these documents are ad hoc; they are addressed to specific problems that arose in the early Church, and none claim to present the whole of Christian revelation. It's doubtful that St. Paul even suspected that his short letter to Philemon begging pardon for a renegade slave would some day be read as Holy Scripture.
Who, then, decided that it was Scripture? The Catholic Church. And it took several centuries to do so. It was not until the Council of Carthage (397) and a subsequent decree by Pope Innocent I that Christendom had a fixed New Testament canon. Prior to that date, scores of spurious gospels and "apostolic" writings were floating around the Mediterranean basin: the Gospel of Thomas, the "Shepherd" of Hermas, St. Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans, and so forth. Moreover, some texts later judged to be inspired, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, were controverted. It was the Magisterium, guided by the Holy Spirit, which separated the wheat from the chaff.
But, according to Protestants, the Catholic Church was corrupt and idolatrous by the fourth century and so had lost whatever authority it originally had. On what basis, then, do they accept the canon of the New Testament? Luther and Calvin were both fuzzy on the subject. Luther dropped seven books from the Old Testament, the so-called Apocrypha in the Protestant Bible; his pretext for doing so was that orthodox Jews had done it at the synod of Jamnia around 100 A. D.; but that synod was explicitly anti-Christian, and so its decisions about Scripture make an odd benchmark for Christians.
Luther's real motive was to get rid of Second Maccabees, which teaches the doctrine of Purgatory. He also wanted to drop the Letter of James, which he called "an epistle of straw," because it flatly contradicts the idea of salvation by "faith alone" apart from good works. He was restrained by more cautious Reformers. Instead, he mistranslated numerous New Testament passages, most notoriously Romans 3:28, to buttress his polemical position.
The Protestant teaching that the Bible is the sole spiritual authority--sola scriptura --is nowhere to be found in the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy that Scripture is "useful" (which is an understatemtn), but neither he nor anyone else in the early Church taught sola scriptura. And, in fact, nobody believed it until the Reformation. Newman called the idea that God would let fifteen hundred years pass before revealing that the bible was the sole teaching authority for Christians an "intolerable paradox."
Newman also wrote: "It is antecedently unreasonable to Bsuppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself...." And, indeed, once they had set aside the teaching authority of the Church, the Reformers began to argue about key Scriptural passages. Luther and Zwingli, for example, disagreed vehemently about what Christ meant by the words, "This is my Body."
St. Augustine, usually Luther's guide and mentor, ought to have the last word about sola scriptura: "But for the authority of the Church, I would not believe the Gospel."
“Try the Episcopalians. They’ve spun out of control these past few years, sadly so.”
In my post to which you have responded, note the artful use of the term “personally.”
And faces that launched a thousand ships and serviced the fleet..
Not yet, anyway...
Because He said to do it in remembrance of Him and that’s just what we do.
We don’t diss Mary, as you say. We just don’t put her on a huge pedestal and expect her to talk Jesus into answering our prayers. HE is the only intercessor and as God, he doesn’t need Mary to point anything out to him. She’s dead.
Without apostolic succession, you're not even doing it, let alone in remembrance of Him or anything else.
You don't believe in eternal life?
We pray to God through His Son, Jesus. We don’t pray to the Holy Spirit or Mary, or Saints or any of that stuff.
Absolutely NOT. The Holy Spirit doesn’t answer prayers. He guides and directs but He is not our intercessor.
Absolutely NOT. The Holy Spirit doesn’t answer prayers. He guides and directs but He is not our intercessor.
The early Church was under the guidance of the Holy Spirit when it led them to produce what became the canon of Scripture. This does not apply to every other thing the Church has ever done or ever taught, especially when what the Church teaches goes against the clear direction and sayings of Scripture.
It's pretty simple, actually, and Protestants have known it for a long time, but occasionally we need to remind our Catholic brethren that Sola Scriptura doesn't mean "the Bible alone" it simply means that all that is necessary for faith and salvation, Christian doctrine, can be found in the Word of God that is written in Holy Scripture. This doesn't mean we have to toss out everything else, or even tradition but simply that tradition can only be validated in light of Scripture.
Like I said, pretty easy, but of course, leave it to the Catholic Church to try and distort or complicate the issue.
Nah, they kicked out old St. Christopher. He ain’t a saint now.
Have you ever considered that you are simply repeating someone's talking points? The comment above sounds similar in tone to an Mahmoud Ahmadinejad description of America the great Satan or perhaps a Pravda article. You might want to check your facts using both reformed and traditional (i.e. non-protestant) sources, rather than merely repeating someone's propaganda.
And if two people make this claim about their diametrically-opposed beliefs, one of them is wrong.
I ask for the favor of God on my life. Saints are DEAD. Why should we ask dead people to pray for us?
Again, no eternal life? No hereafter?
Yep, love em. Less nanner pudding and sweat tea and more sausage and peppers and lasagna trays.
Sounds ghastly.
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